I'm a consultant and a flash developer, with former careers in graphic design, web strategy, and music production. My goal is to create better experiences through code, design, and talking about the business value of good user experiences.

I like LifeBlog. It’s one of the leaner apps bundled with Nokia N90. If it wasn’t so notoriously slow to start up, I would prefer it as a photo browser over the Gallery application. I also like the ability to upload photos to Flickr right from the phone, using LifeBlog.

I could envision an interesting experiment to do the whole user interface of the phone with a LifeBlog-like interface: a continuous stream of photos, sounds, videos, incoming and outgoing messages and calls. The list could allow the user to filter out specific types of content, by showing only text messages, for instance.

One, albeit minor, thing bugs me though. It bugs me because it is unnecessary, easy to fix, and points out the marriage to technology that undermines even such a streamlined product as LifeBlog. It is the installation procedure which entertains me over the long wait by candidly informing of how the wheels are moving inside the app. Sorry guys, but phrases like “creating database links” really do not belong on a phone. They belong to SQL clients, used by developers. My parents don’t know what a database link is, and frankly, they couldn’t care less. Showing such messages to the user achieves only one thing: confusion.

You don’t want to baffle the consumers as they will vote with their cash. When they get a chance anyway. Until then they’ll keep on buying one of the substandard products on offer, hopefully yours.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 10:20 and is filed under English.
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